Is Weapons (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) THE film of 2025? It might be the most surprising, in both performance (a whopping $250 million in theatrical sales worldwide) and plot developments (NO SPOILERS, and I MEAN IT). It might be the most provocative, the most entertaining, the most horrifying, the most out-of-left-field comedic – and it might just be the best of the year, period. Writer-director Zach Cregger follows up 2022’s exhilarating and nasty Barbarian with another horror-comedy, but this time, he partners his eye-popping gore and unexpected twists with a powder keg of ideas couched within a lost-children mystery set amidst suburban dysfunction, with a game-for-all-of-it cast led by Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Cary Christopher, and an omigosh-unrecognizable Amy Madigan. I didn’t see any of this coming, you didn’t see any of this coming, nobody saw any of this coming, and we’re all better for it.
The Gist: A young girl’s voiceover tells us “this is a true story” over a black screen. It’s not. But it could be. Well, some elements of it, anyway. Maybe not the text. But the subtext? All too plausible. We’ll get to that later. For now, we listen as she tells us what happened in the everytown of Maybrook: One day, third-grade teacher Justine Gandy (Garner) walked into her classroom to find it empty save for one child, Alex (Christopher). The other 17 bolted from their homes at 2:17 a.m. without warning. We see them, dashing through the night, their arms outstretched like airplane wings, triggering motion-sensor lights and door cams. Police grilled Justine and little Alex, but haven’t a clue where the kids are or why they ran. Weeks later, the community gathers in the town hall to foist their fear, anger and confusion upon Justine, who digs in and swears she has nothing to do with the disappearances. Nobody buys it. They angry-mob her out the door.
Title card: JUSTINE. It’s the first of several chapters following a Maybrookian (Maybrookite?). She doesn’t go right home and lock the door like she should, instead stopping for two fifths of vodka first. Someone paints the word WITCH on the side of her car that night. She has an overnight encounter with a local cop, Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), who’s married; it’s not their first such encounter. And she also just wants to talk to Alex – “We’re the only ones left,” she murmurs – but Principal Marcus Miller (Benedict Wong) advises her to keep her distance, for the boy’s sake. He isn’t wrong, and neither is she, but she may not be in the right when she follows Alex home – and finds his house in a creepy state, its windows covered with newspapers, the lawn overgrown. She finds a sliver to peek through and sees two people motionless on the couch. Eerie.
Next, ARCHER (Brolin). He’s the father of one of the missing children. He sleeps in his son’s bed, has a bizarre dream, screws things up at his job, fires question after question at the police chief (Toby Huss), who has no answers. He studies the doorbell-cam footage of his boy running away, hectors other grieving parents to see their footage and starts drawing red lines and circles on a map. He triangulates. He’s gotta put some straight lines atop this conundrum lest he lose his mind and his hope. Now, PAUL. On patrol, he spots James (Austin Abrams) trying to jimmy his way into a building; a chase ensues. That night, Paul strolls into a bar for a drink with Justine, and the overnight encounter we saw earlier occurs again, from different camera angles. And here is JAMES, a desperate addict, homeless, hustling for a fix, eventually wandering through town and finding a certain house with a certain overgrown lawn and certain newspapers over the windows, seemingly ripe to be burgled. MARCUS follows, and in this chapter we see Amy Madigan as Aunt Gladys, who visits school, saying she’s little Alex’s guardian. Her clothing is garish, her wig a blazing red, her glasses enormous, her makeup seemingly applied via leafblower. No, really. Seriously? Who is this woman? Why have we seen glimpses of her before in what we thought were dream sequences and drug-induced hallucinations? And who are you to question this woman’s fashion choices? Weaponized though they may be?
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Cregger identified Magnolia and Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners as influences; I see Sam Raimi if he had structured Drag Me to Hell like Pulp Fiction. Longlegs courted a similar complex tone and breadth of ideas, albeit in messier fashion. And this is the most effective use of heavily symbolic triangles since The Neon Demon.
Performance Worth Watching: Ehrenreich, ever underrated, is such a brilliantly funny portrait of patheticism, and Brolin and Garner carry significant dramatic weight here. But the movie might not be nearly as enduring without Madigan, who arrives to goose the story down the stretch, and give it a sinister, volatile edge.
Memorable Dialogue: “It’s just a touch of consumption!” is destined to be the enduring meme. But I think the film’s mantra, repeated by multiple characters – and surely the audience – is “What the FUCK!!!”
Sex and Skin: A brief sex scene with out-of-frame bumpity-bump.
Our Take: If The Substance can get Oscar nominations, so can this. With Weapons, Cregger crafts a deadly potent home-brew of comedy, horror and social drama fueled with rough-hewn emotion and driven by a rigorous, dynamic camera. His Barbarian was winking and provocative in a more direct, rudimentary manner, designed to elicit physical disgust and a classical horror-film fight-or-flight response. Weapons is a clear progression in tone and thematic depth, with a leap and a bound into psychological poignancy: What unseen, inexplicable forces might drive our children away from us? How does one cope with loss when there’s no closure, no body to be recovered? Does grief promote personal growth, or does it simply damage us? These are ideas we all wrestle with, sometimes long into sleepless nights, when the world becomes a place of unconquerable mystery and strangeness, and we just want to bellow the movie’s unofficial mantra into the void. You know: “What the FUCK!!!”
The film at least offers one clear-cut lesson – what not to do with a vegetable peeler. Cregger’s ingenuity lies in his ability to make us laugh as much as we cry as much as we clench our teeth and scrunch our faces into ghastly miens of revulsion. He dishes out moments of extreme, unforgettable violence with comic timing to rival Looney Tunes or the Coen Bros., and he captures key scenes with elegantly composed POV and tracking shots that keenly balance immediacy with raw electricity. The cast navigates Cregger’s tragicomic tone exquisitely, playing deeply flawed but sympathetic characters – Garner crafts Justine as someone not keen on apologizing for who she is, Brolin renders Archer as a brutish sort who veers from gross illogic to, finally, a place of reason as he tries to figure out what happened to his kid. And it’s absolutely worth noting that the flames of the core characters’ isolation is fed by the oxygen of desperation, bungling through their interactions with others as they seek some kind of salve for their pain.
So as Weapons brushes up against addiction, infidelity, bullying, small-town everyone-knows-you-ism, the impotency of authority, the violation and usefulness (or lack thereof) of propriety, depression, the state of our fractured communities, generational discord and the constant threat of violence, is it a provocative shotgun blast of critical commentary, or simply incoherent? Well, I hereby insist that a film needn’t be tidy to be great. Cregger incorporates the supernatural into the text so it may represent all manner of inexplicable real-life allegorical boogeymen, whether they lurk inside us or at large in the world.
Initially, the non-linear narrative feels like a drunken weave down the sidewalk heading to who-knows-where, only to become razor-sharp by the final act – another instance of the film surprising and delighting us. It leads to the wildest and most memorable ending of any movie in recent memory, a delirious melange of feral intensity and unsettling emotions couched within an eye-popping action sequence that’s vibrant and nasty, hilarious on the surface and crushingly sad beneath. Cregger treads oh-so-carefully when it means it most, drawing an exquisite, everything’s-not-quite-all-right kind of non-conclusion that feels like the stuff of a true story. Terrible things happen in this world, and we may never fully recover from them. But there’s still hope. There’s always hope.
Our Call: Weapons puts every other movie of 2025 on notice. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.